Just Like Us!

Everyone knows that Madame Bovary is a classic novel, but have you ever considered how much you share with its yearning, adulterous, and, yes, fashion-loving protagonist? Daphne Merkin gets up close and personal with the most modern of literary heroines

Madame Bovary," the writer Gustave Flaubert famously said of his most indelible creation, Emma Bovary, the very desperate housewife of Yonville, "c'est moi." The truth is that Emma, with her visions of a grander life and resplendent passions, is me, as well—and you, too, no doubt. She is every woman who has felt that prosaic reality isn't quite what she bargained for, that marriage is a letdown, and that her specialness goes unappreciated. ("If my book is good," Flaubert wrote to his mistress Louise Colet, "it will gently caress many a feminine wound: More than one woman will smile as she recognizes herself in it.") How a 30-year-old bachelor—one who led a mostly hermetic existence with his widowed mother in provincial Rouen in nineteenth-century France, agonized over every word, and read his work-in-progress aloud to himself as well as to a small audience of attentive male friends—came to invent a woman who is recognizably one of us, whose every gesture and passing thought strikes us as quintessentially female, is among the great artistic mysteries, a literary act of gender-bending if ever there was one. (Interestingly, the poet Charles Baudelaire, ever the perspicacious reader, also discerned some masculine qualities in Emma, which led him to characterize her as a "bizarre androgyne.")

Along the way to telling the story of a small-town girl, a love addict and shopaholic who dreamed big and ended up swallowing arsenic to escape her menacing creditors, Flaubert scandalized the cultural arbiters of his time. The publication of the novel, which first appeared in installments in La Revue de Paris in 1856, was initially contested by the French government, which charged Flaubert, his printer, and his publisher with blasphemy and offense against public morals. All charges were eventually dismissed, but—as it has ever been—the novel's cachet was assured by the publicity generated by the trial. The book's ongoing renown, however, goes deeper, hinging on the fact that Flaubert succeeded in creating a new literary form: the realistic novel, the precursor to an entire genre of books that takes the commonplace as its subject. It is no accident that, except for matters of pacing, Madame Bovary reads like it was written yesterday; its concerns reflect and in many ways anticipate our own. "In Madame Bovary," Mario Vargas Llosa wrote in The Perpetual Orgy, "we see the first signs of the alienation that a century later will take hold of men and women in industrial societies (the women above all, owing to the life they are obliged to live): consumption as an outlet for anxiety, the attempt to people with objects the emptiness that modern life has made a permanent feature of the existence of the individual."

Perhaps the most overt aspect of this perceived alienation is the condition of anomie, or "atrocious ennui," as Flaubert called it, which plagued both the author—already as a 12-year-old he'd despaired of "this crude joke called life"—and his heroine: " `I've read everything,' she would say to herself. And she would hold the tongs in the fire till they turned red, or watch the rain fall."

The sense of boredom, of time hanging heavy, that afflicts Emma from the start of her life as the wife of Charles Bovary, a good-hearted but rather obtuse doctor ("Charles' conversation was as flat as a sidewalk") whose adoration of Emma blinds him to her growing discontent, is almost palpable. It's not that different from the anxiety of choice that plagues many women in their twenties and thirties today—the idea that there might be someone better out there than the man you happen to be with, that if you go on just one more date, you might find Prince Charming. (At its worst, this conviction can lead to making no choice, to finding oneself alone at 40, like Lori Gottlieb in Marry Him.) "[Emma] would wonder whether there hadn't been some way, through other chance combinations, of meeting a different man; and she would try to imagine those events that had not taken place, that different life, that husband whom she did not know.... He could have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, as were those, no doubt, whom her older schoolmates from the convent had married. What were they doing now? In the city, amid the din of the streets, the buzz of the theaters, and the lights of the ballroom, they were leading lives in which the heart expands, the senses blossom. But her own life was as cold as an attic with a north-facing window, and boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart."

Of course, one of the main reasons that Emma got into this pickle in the first place is precisely her habit of reading, which first took hold in the convent school she attended as a girl. She is an avid consumer of romantic literature, some of it good (Sir Walter Scott) and some of it less so, but all of which she uses as material for lush escapist daydreams. Charles' mother, Mère Bovary, who personally terminates her daughter-in-law's subscription at the lending library, is not entirely wrong when she insists that Emma would be better off if she were forced to work rather than stuffing her head with bloated ideas. ("Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words `bliss,' `passion,' and `intoxication,' which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.") One could argue that if she were a less superficial reader—and Flaubert's tone of jeering irony is never more apparent than when he is describing Emma's youthful preference for novels that "were always and only about love, lovers, paramours, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to death on every page, gloomy forests, troubled hearts, oaths, sobs, tears and kisses"—she wouldn't have mistaken her fantasies for reality and her life would have turned out differently.

As it is, she falls into adulterous liaisons with not one but two cads, both of whom appeal to her overheated Technicolor imagination, like the guy who looks good standing at the bar rather than the one who might really care about you. (Ironically enough, except for her choice of the stolid Charles—who does really love her—Emma has tragically bad taste in men.) The first, Rodolphe, is a jaded landowner who appears on Emma's horizon as "a gentleman dressed in a green velvet frock coat" and wearing "yellow gloves" when he brings a manservant to her husband to be bled. Rodolphe observes Emma's fetching appearance ("Lovely teeth, dark eyes, a trim little foot, and a figure like a Parisian") and her hunger for romance ("That one's gasping for love like a carp for water on a kitchen table"), but even as he considers how to ensnare her ("With three pretty compliments, that one would adore me, I'm sure of it!"), he worries about being able to eventually dump her.

The second, Léon, is a cautious, sentimentally inclined law clerk who meets Emma early in the book and trades pieties with her about the beauty of the natural world—sunsets, the sea, mountain scenery—as well as the pleasure to be found in reading, but lacks the courage to put his lust for her into action. They meet again three years later, after Emma has already been through the mill with Rodolphe, and this time around they throw themselves into a steamy affair, consummated during a carriage ride through Paris. Emma's habitual recklessness when it comes to the pursuit of pleasure only accelerates; though she briefly tries to find salvation through the church, her twin narcotics remain sex and shopping, havens in a world she deems unworthy of her. She runs up bills with the scheming moneylender Lheureux (as with Dickens, Flaubert's names usually have a significance) to fund her sordid intrigue, until she is finally caught in his trap and receives an order from the bailiff stating that the contents of her house will be seized. After trying in vain to raise money—she turns to Rodolphe, who blandly insists he can't help her—Emma commits suicide, leaving in her wake a young daughter and a grief-stricken husband.

Gustave Flaubert was first and foremost a stylist; indeed, he believed that "there is no such thing as subject—style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things." He took infinite pains with his prose, scrubbing and polishing his sentences "with a love," as he once described it in a letter, "that is frantic and perverted, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt that scratches his belly." Scholarly papers galore have been written in an effort to decipher the novel's cunning structure and brilliant imagery, but in the end it is the half-endearing, half-contemptible figure at its center that so engages our interest. Views of the novel's message have changed along with the times, from seeing it as a condemnation of bourgeois society to an exposé of women's constricted role in a patriarchal culture. Emma Bovary has been regarded variously as a hysteric (the prevailing nineteenth-century diagnosis), a nihilist (reflective of nineteenth-century diagnosis), a nihilist (reflective of Flaubert's own conviction of ultimate futility), and a depressive with an ongoing death wish. By today's standards, she might also be regarded as a manic-depressive and a borderline personality—unable to connect to other people in a sustaining way, incapable of giving or receiving love, and thus doomed to loneliness. What she assuredly is above all is unforgettable, in the glimmers of intelligence that flash through her abiding vulgarity, in the resilience of her longings, in her ineffable humanness. A Don Quixote in petticoats, she sallies forth into the world guided by her frantic illusions of conquest, of rising above her station and becoming one of those high-society ladies she has read about: "Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to.... But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day, and she would listen to every sound, spring to her feet, feel surprised that it did not come; then, at sunset, always more sorrowful, she would wish the next day were already there."

We who play it safer behind our picket fences identify with her, root for her, and blush for her. It might be said that we feel the same complex emotions about Emma—a mixture of deep affec­tion and scorn—as did the man who invented her and infused the novel with a double vision, one part expressing repugnance for Emma's flights of fancy and disregard of ordinary obligations, and the other sympathizing with Emma's desire to transcend the painful drudgery of a world in which it's acceptable to award an old peasant woman 25 francs for 54 years of domestic servitude.